It’s not every day that throwing an interception in the end zone can win your team the game. But it happened at the end of the Monday Night Football game that saw the Green Bay Packers get robbed and the Seattle Seahawks benefit from one of the worst calls in NFL history.
I’m not going to complain about the replacement referees. Everyone is bitching about them enough already. But the real issue goes far deeper than blown calls and excessive penalties.
This lockout is just another chapter in a long history of union busting.
We all remember the player lockout from last season. Just like this lockout, that one was about how much money the owners were going to have to give the players.
It’s always about money. At the heart of every union busting effort is a fight over how much money the workers are going to get paid.
With the Presidential Election right around the corner, unions, fair pay and a livable wage will be part of the debate between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The Republicans are trying to bust every union in the country. And if Romney wins the presidency, expect an all-out assault on organized labor.
There have already been numerous states that have successfully busted unions that deal with the government. The most publicized one was in Wisconsin, where Republican Governor Scott Walker successfully ended collective bargaining for the state’s teachers, nurses and other public employees.
In a bit of irony, Governor Walker has called for the union refs to be re-instated. Wisconsin is, of course, home to the Packers.
Owners will always try to pay their worker as little as possible. Unions will always fight for a livable wage. Republicans like to talk about the “good old days” when a family could survive on one income and the middle class was strong. What they conveniently forget to mention is that was the time when unions were their strongest. That was a time when America was the manufacturing capital of the world.
People could buy homes and send their kids to college simply by working in an auto factory.
There is a reason why Mitt Romney wanted to let the auto industry go bankrupt. After going bankrupt they could restructure each company without the unions. They could then pay their workers far lower wages and then they could make more profit.
The NFL is a $9 billion a year industry. $9 BILLION. The difference between what the refs want and what the owners are willing to give them is about $3 million. That averages out to about $100,000 extra per team. That’s less than they are paying their third-string defensive tackle that you’ve never heard of.
The NFL officials’ starting salary is approximately $78,000 a year. The officials in the three other major sports in America make over $100,000 per year. The owners will argue that the NFL refs only work 16 games per season and the other officials in the other leagues work 82-163 games depending on the sport.
This is true, but it is exactly why they need the best officials working the game… With only 16 games in the season, every game counts. When a blown call changes the outcome of a game, like it did on Monday Night Football, that could mean the difference between a team making the playoffs.
No matter what business you are in, you want the best workers doing their best work. No one wants to drive around in a car that is built by a bunch of incompetent workers who were only hired because they will work cheaply.
The owners can easily afford this, but breaking the union is more important to them.
This lockout goes further than the NFL and professional sports. It highlights a trend in this country where those on the side of owners are trying their hardest to dissolve all unions and drive down the cost of labor.
The only reason they want to drive down the cost of labor is so they can make more money. But how much is enough? How many yachts can they water ski behind?
The owners really need to take a look in the mirror and ask themselves these questions. Their greed is doing damage to the business that they help build and if they are not careful, that damage could be permanent.
Israel is a sports blogger, contributor to GlobalGrind.com and owner of SportsBrosWorld.com
